I couldn’t figure out why I was waking up pissed off. That’s not my usual morning state.
But for two mornings in a row, I was irritated from the moment I woke up. I tried to stay with it for a while the first evening, but in the end I distracted myself with sugar and magazines.
The second day, when I woke up and realized that my emotional state had not simply “reset” overnight, I was determined to get to the root of it. So I just observed and questioned my state all morning and into the shower in the early afternoon.
And suddenly, voila, it hit me. I was jealous. Enormously, all out jealous. Of a blogger. And not even a blogger who’s blog I’m currently following. No, it’s a blogger in a book that I’m reading and her blogging experience happened in 2003.
The book is Julie & Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously. I’m enjoying it immensely and parts of it are really laugh-out-loud funny and I can’t wait to see the movie…
but for right now Julie Powell is pissing me off. I’m jealous of her. And my training has taught me to pay great attention to jealousy.
Jealousy is one of the single biggest clues we can get to our purpose, life mission, and about who we’re longing to become.
And the more I questioned my jealousy the more apparent it became that part of what I’m longing to become is a blogger.
So, even though I had “Post to my blog” on my weekly To Do list on my phone and I had finally started opening my blog panel and tweaking things recently, in the end it was the pure fire of jealousy that got me back here.
I just couldn’t stand any longer reading about her posts and all the comments she was getting and how connected she felt doing it. A part of me was screaming inside “That’s MY life. That’s how it’s supposed to be for ME.”
And truly, I had never even really acknowledged that I was longing for any of that when I started blogging last December. I just knew I was incredibly excited by it and didn’t fully understand why.
And then, of course, I did what I do to all really great and exciting things that come along in my life….I sabotaged it.
I stopped. I lost interest. I got busy for really good reasons.
We all do this. And the more longing and desire there is around what we’re doing and the higher the stakes feel, the more we resist and sabotage it.
Until something wonderful like jealousy calls us out of our self-induced fog about it and smacks us upside the heart.
If we’re lucky.
So look for the jealousy in your life. Where is it? Who’s living the life that’s “supposed to” be yours? Who’s got what you want?
Sometimes we won’t even know up front that we’re jealous – we’ll just be pissed off at them for no apparent reason.
Excellent…dig deeper. And honour what you find. It’s important.
